BANGOR, Maine (NEWS CENTER)--It's a classic winter scene, a plow clearing the latest snow fall from the road. But winter can also cause other problems, power outages.
Bangor Hydro communications officer Susan Faloon says when freezing rain accumulates of power lines and hanging limbs, outages are likely.
"If we do see that icing and we're right at that temperature then we certainly could see you know as many as 10, 15, 20 thousand or we could not just see anything at all," Faloon said.
That's why Bangor Hydro thought it would be good to come up with a way for customers to report outages right from their smart phones. If customers want to report and outage from their phone all they need to do is go on the internet and go to www.bhe.com/m. Once the page loads you can click on report an outage and fill in your information.
"And it just asks the customer some basic information, most importantly his account number he can put in his name and address, what phone number we can reach him at," Gary Duplisea said.
On the website, customers can see interactive maps that show where power outages are located, the number of customers affected, street names that are affected and it tells you approximately how long it will take to get your power back.
Faloon said this mobile website was on of many priorities that were talked about to get power restored faster.
"We've talking about it for a year or so and of course there were multiple priorities and we really wanted to get some changes in place that we're really gonna be the most effective at speeding up the restoration process," Faloon said
Right now the mobile site is very basic but that could change.
"There isn't much functionality that we have put out there right now. There's only 6 or 7 different things, but I'm thinking over time this will probably expand and will have more functionality so that folks can get on our website through a smart phone," Duplisea said
So the next time the lights go out, you can use your smart phone to report it.
NEWS CENTER